


Close Encounters of the Analog Kind

by grasssea



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universes, Gen, request
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 17:31:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7371094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grasssea/pseuds/grasssea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which even in alternate universes, Chloe Decker refuses to be what people expect her to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Close Encounters of the Analog Kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [General_Zargon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/General_Zargon/gifts).



> General_Zargon asked "Sweet. :) Can I prompt you: canon!Chloe meets her AU demon and angel selves. Only her demon self isn't very demonic and her angel self set a new record for the quickest Fall (she didn't even get passed the gates). :D What do you think? Might get a one-shot or two out of it? ;) I wish you the best of luck on your writing!" 
> 
> I really liked the idea so I gave it a shot and spent frankly way too much time on the names, which I'm proud to say are mythology accurate and alliterative. Hope you like it!

It was dark and still, no floor, no walls, nothing but a warm and rolling darkness. Somehow, Chloe wasn’t panicking. 

She wasn’t awake. 

She couldn’t actually remember falling asleep, but she knew in some bone deep way that this was fine. She thought it had to be a dream, even if she couldn’t usually remember her dreams. There was the sense of sliding reality that you would expect from dreaming, everything comfortably surreal. 

“You’re new.” a voice, female, low, a little too jaded said. Chloe turned, or the dark turned for her, and looked at the angel wearing her face. 

Oh, god. 

She GLOWED. All caps intended. It burned up the optic nerves and illuminated the whole brain with cold golden light. 

It didn’t matter what she was wearing, just that it was dark and functional. The wings, huge and burnished bronze, folded behind her, were too distracting. It took Chloe a few minutes to focus on the face. 

It was hers, or at least the face she saw in pictures, slightly unfamiliar in the way portraits are. Nose too thin, eyes too wide set in face that was all angles. Mouth curled unpleasantly, but eyes curious, or at least Chloe thought they were. It was less easy to read your own face than some people might think. Fear finally started to curl like smoke in her chest, belated but still appreciated. Terror made everything feel a little more real. 

“What are you?” she asked, and Chloe found herself at a loss for words. 

“She’s us.” said another, identical voice from behind the glow of the wings. Chloe’s face peered around them. Even though she had the exact same nose, somehow her smile gave it a mischievous tilt. A scar-long healed but still nasty-ran through her eyebrow and skipped over her eye to her cheek bone, a vertical slash of silver in a face lit up golden by the wings. 

(Oh, god, the wings.)

Chloe the second (or… the third?) stepped out from behind the angel wings and waved. “This is quite the turn of events.” she said, her features unreadable. “Isn’t it, Angelface? It’s only ever been the two of us before.”

“She’s human.” the first new Chloe said, in a tone of confusion and what Chloe thought might have been distaste. 

The more amiable of the imposters nodded. “I guessed. We’re batting three for three now.”

Wings rolled her eyes. 

“This is a really weird dream.” Chloe said. She hadn’t meant to open her mouth, but it was comforting to hear it out loud. This was a dream, to be forgotten in the morning. 

Not-Wings smiled, sympathetically. “That’s what we think too. Of course, we’ve never managed to agree on who’s doing the dreaming, especially since our people don’t usually dream. She thinks I’m a figment of her imagination, sent to judge her for her sins.” The deadpan tone reminded Chloe of how she talked about Lucifer to other people. Just a little self deprecating, ‘Yes, I know, he thinks he’s the devil. Hollywood, am I right?’

“I think that this is a very disturbing change.” Wings snapped and her… wings, rustled behind her. “It’s always been the two of us.”

“For how long?” Chloe managed to ask. Thinking overrode talking and it took some concentrated effort to get her vocal cords working. “And what do you mean by our people?”

Not Wings gestured. “Angel, demon, respectively. And you are?”

“I’m- I’m a cop.” Chloe choked out. “I’m a cop and I’ve clearly been spending way too much time with Lucifer. This is fucked up.”

Wings- Angel- AlterChloe-Whatever, looked invested for the first time. She raised a thin eyebrow. “Lucifer? Lord of Hell?”

“My stupid coworker who is clearly getting into my head.” Chloe moaned. “That explains all of this.” She didn’t have a headache but she felt like she should have one and that was what really mattered. 

The self proclaimed demon in the not-room screwed her nose up in disgust. “I expected better of you, human girl.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Chloe said, “I expected better of myself. But some things happen.”

“Hmph.” Angel wings rustled again, folded and unfolded like arches of beaming gold. “I think you’ll find we happen to other people.”

“She always was a drama queen.” the demon whispered in sotto voice. 

Wasn’t the point of lucid dreaming supposed to be that you could control it? Chloe had been desperately wishing herself away for minutes and nothing had happened yet. She wanted a dreaming refund. “This is ridiculous.” she told them, angel and demon both. The angel nodded in agreement which somehow just made Chloe feel more out of it. “I’m serious.” she told them, “I’m a respected cop, a mother, I didn’t ask for all this. Lucifer isn’t too bad, but this is a step too far.”

“If you’re here with us, you’re here to be an example.” the demon shrugged. “As near as we can tell. It doesn’t matter who you are, you’re us. And if you’re us, you’re probably doing something you’re not supposed to.”

“I don’t even want to know.” Chloe warned, trying to back away and finding space had no real meaning. 

“Too bad. Angelface, you’re the cautionary tale. Tell our mystery human how you Fell.”

Fell. It sounded like something Lucifer would say. The words, the sly smirk, it was all Lucifer. The rage on the angel’s face, that was Lucifer too. Lucifer bleeding through her own features. 

Screw the subconscious. This was absolutely unacceptable. 

Chloe said as much. 

“That’s the spirit.” the demon told her. “Maybe you aren’t so out of place after all. I don’t know what you are to Lucifer, in the world where you were made to be. But I never wanted anything to do with him or them.”

“You refused to accept your duty.” the angel snarled.

“Same difference. If I am to be an imp, let me be the imp of free will.” 

It sounded like an argument long worn. Chloe slumped against the supportive darkness. 

“You reject justice in place of chaos.”

“I refuse to let anyone tell me what to do. You should understand that, Fallen one.”

“I fell out of duty. You rebelled out of spite.”

“You fell because get your jollies off of seeing bad people get punished. I prefer to see people live.”

“There is an order to things.”

“There is a world out there! Demons, angels, what does it matter? Why do they get to tell me what to do?”

“Please shut up.” Chloe snapped, “Or I’ll arrest you both.”

“Little miss Law and Order then.” the demon smirked. It was a very Maze like smirk. “Can’t say I blame you. She is impossible to deal with.” 

Chloe rolled her eyes. “Between you guys and Lucifer I’m not very impressed with what Heaven or Hell has to offer. Can you stop acting like five year olds? I’d just like to ride this out and wake up.”

“It doesn’t quite work like that.” One of them, and Chloe had sort of given up making distinctions- they’re just two pale faces and two dark gold wings- said. “We need time to reflect on our sins. Or my not-sins, as it goes.”

“Our choices.” the angel corrected. She seemed less talkative. For that, Chloe liked her more. 

Chloe gave in and took the bait. “What did you even do?”

Her demonic doppelganger shrugged. “I was made. I decided I didn’t like what I was made to be. So I left and wandered the world of men.”

“I Fell.” It seemed for a second that would be all, but then- “I was made among the younger of the angels. I saw a world of beauty. But there was unbalance in it already. Lucifer…. sought more than he should have and I moved to strike him down, and for that I fell with him. As the first to try to punish wickedness in all of Creation, I was given a place in hell, to mete out justice forevermore.”

There weren’t many ways to respond to that. Chloe looked at her demonic self who just mouthed ‘drama queen’, which wasn’t much help. 

“But- if you tried to stop Lucifer, isn’t that a good thing?” she asked, finding herself drawn into the insanity despite her best efforts. Clearly this was why she hadn’t managed to shake off Lucifer yet. 

“God’s choices cannot be questioned. I showed a talent for justice, for making people pay for their crimes. So he sent me to put that talent to it’s best use.”

“She means our heavenly father is deadbeat dad. Meanwhile as she put criminals to the rack, I got to see the world. I got to make my own choices. I travelled. They called me by many names, Alal and Kesilim and-” 

“Chloe” Chloe breathed. 

Demon Chloe tilted her head. “Yes, that was one of my names, among the Greeks. Green growing. Life, joy. One of hers too, somehow. She wanders the world on occasion, though she is usually called Kushiel.”

Kushiel spoke up and it was hard to ignore her voice. It had the same quality as Lucifer’s, just not quite as grating. “Your name is Chloe, isn’t it?”

Chloe nodded. 

“Well, isn’t this cozy?” the demon- Chloe was calling her Kesilim since it fit the theme best- sighed, tugging on her sleeves. She was apparently incapable of shutting up.

“Do you do this often?” Chloe asked. 

“Once a century or so.” Kushiel answered. “I think it is my punishment. I abandoned my path, and so did she, I must see how foolish I look in other people’s eyes by looking at her.”

“She fails to mention,” Kesilim added, “That my path was to be a demon and harm others. Instead I chose to be a small demon. To poke fun at people, rather than being a scourge on humanity.”

“She has a point.” Chloe said. “Much as I hate to get into theology with you people. Less demons seems like a good thing.”

Kushiel frowned. “It’s the principle of the matter. You are a servant of the law, aren’t you? Surely you understand order.”

“Not when it isn’t fair.”

“Finally, a voice of reason.” Kesilim had the audacity to look like Maze again, self assured and self satisfied. Chloe hoped she never looked half as smug. They were both acting worse than Trixie.

“Stupid questions, probably, but do either of you get any deep revelations out of this or do you just bait each other?” Chloe inquired.

There was an awkward silence. 

“Just bait each other then. Well, I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve this-” (“Probably the part where apparently you hang out with the devil for some reason, just a guess.”) “but I don’t feel like listening to you two fight. So how about everyone shuts up until whoever is dreaming this mess wakes up and the rest of us can stop existing.”

This time the silence was gratifying. Chloe leaned further into the darkness, closed her eyes, and tried to ignore the sound of someone fidgeting nearby.

Time passed and then someone whispered in her ear, “Do not forget, your actions have consequences.” The harsh orange light pressing against Chloe’s eyelids faded. 

“Oh, there she goes.” said a distinctly Kesilim voice. “And she took the light with her. This is usually when I come around, you know.”

Chloe opened her eyes to pitch darkness. Kushiel, it seemed, had indeed left and forgotten to turn on the lights on the way out. 

“Great.” Chloe said. “Maybe that means this will be over soon. No offense, but chatting with weird supernatural versions of myself isn’t my idea of a good time. This is all actually very disturbing.”

“Humans, always fragile.” Kesilim said, and Chloe could hear her smile. “You think so little of the universe, you refuse to give it credit for all its wonders.”

“If this is the universe, then I think the universe needs a psychiatrist.” Chloe told her. 

“Simmer down, cop, or at least try to. I’m afraid that if you’re like us, you’re not very good at doing what you’re told.”

“That’s a fair assessment.” Soft electric blue shapes were forming in the dark. Her brain didn’t like the all consuming void. Wasn’t that the point of dreams, to give your eyes something to do? 

Cool thin fingers laced through Chloe’s and squeezed, before pulling away. “Well then. Give ‘em hell. Maybe I’ll see you around in a century or so.”

The sudden silence was so great Chloe knew Kesilim wasn’t there anymore either. 

She missed the company now that it was gone. It was disconcerting and fascinating to watch herself and listen to herself act so very strange. 

She really hoped she was going to wake up. Out of all of them, she liked human Chloe the best.


End file.
